Many mass storage media, such as hard disks and flash memory for example, use a partition table which defines how the blocks and/or sectors of the media are grouped into partitions. Each partition has a particular size and location on the media. During the boot process of a computer communicatively coupled to such a mass storage medium, the computer reads the partition table in order to find the location of the operating system (OS) which is installed on the storage medium. The OS, in turn, reads the partition table to locate and access program and data files stored on the medium.